


let your heart hold fast (for this soon shall pass)

by simplyprologue



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Extended Nature Metaphors, F/M, Family Angst, Firewatch au, emotional avoidance, radio sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-17
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-12-03 06:21:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11526348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: It's the summer of 1989 in the Shoshone National Forest. Forced onto leave from her ER, Dr. Abby Griffin decides to send herself out into the middle of nowhere to spend fourteen weeks in exile. It's long days and longer nights with few souls hiking up the trail and no phone calls from her daughter. But she's not entirely alone, with NFS Ranger Marcus Kane on the other end of her radio.Sometimes it's easier to wear your heart on your sleeve when you're not looking the other person in the eye.





	let your heart hold fast (for this soon shall pass)

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** Based on the game Firewatch, though you don't need to have played the game to understand it, I'm mostly ripping off the premise and setting, not much of the actual plot. Rating will go up in the next chapter, because you scream, I scream, we all love it when Marcus makes Abby scream in bed. 
> 
> An entry in the Slackru's 2017 10k Big Bang!

**SHOSHONE NATIONAL FOREST** **  
** **SUMMER 1989**

* * *

 

**DAY 76.**

“Two Forks Tower, come in.” 

The radio crackles to life on the desk, sitting in it’s charging dock. It’s a hazy sort of night, the heat permeating the darkness, making every second slow and syrupy. With a groan, she rolls over. 

“Abby, I can see your light on,” Marcus says again, more amused than annoyed. His voice is teasing, light, and she knows in a moment he’ll start saying whatever he’s planning on telling her regardless of whether or not she responds. Sighing, she lands on her feet just as he says, “Abby…” 

Padding across the lookout, she grabs the radio. 

“Did you ever consider I might be asleep?” 

“You?” he asks, and she can almost imagine a crooked grin on his face, but she’s never seen Marcus Kane’s face, let alone his smile. 

She fights one of her own, circling around the fire finder and map table in the middle of the room to stand at the west-facing windows. Just over two miles away, the Arcadia fire illuminates the conifers in golds and oranges, paints the navy sky a gloomy purple. Since the Forest Service deemed it a controlled burn, there’s nothing for her to do but watch the fire’s slow crawl from the lake to the meadow.

“Some of us don’t stay up all night with our crosswords,” she counters, turning northwards to Marcus’ own tiny dot of light atop the Thorofare trail. 

“How many copies of the  _ Lancet _ do you have with you, again?” 

“Hey there, Ranger,” she says, leaning her elbows on the counter of her meager kitchen. “I’m the nearest doctor within a two-day journey, I’ll remind you.”

“And I am  _ so  _ lucky to have you,” he replies, unperturbed. 

Abby’s asked him before, if he talks to the other lookouts as much as he talks to her. He doesn’t. She’s still not sure what to think of that, except that maybe the other lookouts aren’t of the same age as then. It seems like the sort of gig for college students, a reason to get drunk in the forest for fourteen weeks in the summer. She doubts many go out looking to spend a few months in the Wyoming summer with limited electricity, lackluster running water, and nary a refrigerator or indoor toilet to be found. 

It’s not like  _ she  _ really went looking for it either. 

But her personal leave had been forced on her by County, more than offered. And then she’d seen the ad in the paper, and with Clarke going to study abroad with Jake for the summer… with Clarke barely speaking to her in the first place… well. 

“Five across,  _ bygone medical service,  _ nine letters,” Marcus says, interrupting her thoughts. 

“Oh, so you want something,” she drawls. “I see how it is.” 

“Do you know it or not?” 

He might be sitting at his desk, chewing on the eraser of his pencil. Or does he do his crosswords in ink? She remembers weekend mornings, sitting at the table as she and Jake parsed out the sections of the newspaper that they read, Jake handing the comics to Clarke. None of them ever did any of the puzzles. 

“Can’t I sass you first?” she asks. 

“I imagine you’re going to do it regardless, might as well get it out of the way,” he says. Then, he pauses. “What are you wearing today?”

Abby snorts. “Why should I tell you? You’re looking through your telescope.”

“I would never.” He is, of course. She doesn’t need to get out her binoculars out to see that, not that she would see as far as Thorofare Tower anyway. But Marcus has his rifle scope, one of the last pieces of Army gear he refuses to part with. “That flannel looks good on you.” 

“I am a fuzzy red blob to you,” she answers, but finds herself preening. 

“I’m imagining that it looks good on you. Are you saying that it doesn’t?” 

Her cheeks flush, and she tamps down on the urge to bury her hands in her face. Instead, she grips the radio tighter. 

“Housecall. The word is housecall.” 

“That can’t be,” he says half a moment later. “The first letter is L. Lobotomy?”

Rolling her eyes, she strides across the tower back to her bed, flopping down onto it. The mattress is thin and old and unforgiving on her back; she squirms to try to get into a more comfortable position. “First of all, that’s  _ eight _ letters—”

“I’m scratching out the last box with my pencil.”

“And second of all, we still perform lobotomies.” 

“We? You? Recently?”

“We, as in the body of medical professionals that I belong to. We don’t have much cause for brain surgery in the emergency department.” Though at County, she’s mopped up plenty of brains, but she classes that as something else entirely. She feels a pang of something, maybe longing or irritation, at the fact that she’s still thinking so much about work after seventy-six days out in the Shoshone. “It’s  _ housecall. _ Housecalls are a bygone medical service that we don’t offer anymore..”

“Is that the royal we, or—”

“Body of medical professionals,” she answers. 

“What do I have to do to make _ you _ do a housecall, Dr. Griffin?” 

His voice has changed to a low rasp. 

She flushes redder, and has to remind herself that she’s not married anymore. Marcus is flirting with her, and that’s  _ okay.  _ Good, even. The last thing Jackson told her before she got in the wagon to drive to Cody was to try, just  _ try _ to put it all behind her. 

“You’re a terrible influence,” she manages to croak out. 

But after this summer, she’s never going to see him again.

Hell, she doesn’t even see him  _ now.  _

So what does it matter? 

 

 

 

 

**DAY 81.**

Braiding her wet hair, she watches the sun recede past the treeline, the sunset painting the sky with rosy fingers. The heat broke sometime in the early morning, giving way to a pleasant warmth that’s now threatening to chill. 

Folding her wet towel into a plastic bag, she tucks it into her pack, then reaches for the radio at her hip. “The water was nice today.” 

Marcus doesn’t respond right away. 

Toeing on her boots and tying the laces tight, Abby starts the mile hike back through Thunder Canyon to her lookout. She’s considering the confiscated bottle of whiskey in her pack when her radio  _ snicks _ with static. 

“You went swimming?”

“I needed a bath.” 

“Ah.” 

She imagines him furrowing his brow — his lookout, by the function of his seniority, has a small shower under it. Not that she thinks it’s good for more than a few bucket fulls of water, but the things she would  _ do  _ to take a decent shower right now. She almost laughs. “What? You didn’t have your scope for this one?” 

“I would have looked out for you,” he grumbles. “You never know who’s hiking up here.”

“Right now? With the fire? No one,” she says. Not like they see that many people come through anyway. “When was the last time you came down from Thorofare?” 

“Supply drop.”

“No, I mean — explored?”

“I’ve been doing this for a decade, I don’t really have anything left to explore,” he answers brusquely. Abby imagines him looking at a well-marked map of the sectors hanging over his desk, or fiddling with his headset. “The crosswords and the stars are the only things keeping this job interesting.” 

The canyon starts pitching on an incline, and her thighs begin to burn. Even after months of taking this trail, she still gets out of breath. Coming to the shale wall, she tests the soles of her boots, scuffing them over the ground. Huffing, she climbs up, far more sure of her movements than she’d been when she’d first come — and fell — her second or third day on the job. She hauls herself up over the ledge, landing in the grass. Then stands, brushing her hands on her denim shorts before grabbing her radio from her hip. 

“Why do you keep doing it?”

“It’s my job,” he replies, his pencil scratching on paper as he starts yet another crossword. 

“I mean, couldn’t you ask to be re-assigned somewhere else for the season?”

“I wouldn’t get the same seniority.” He chews on his eraser, his teeth clinking softly on the metal ring holding it in place. “Besides, I—”

He cuts himself off. Abby waits, hiking in silence for a long moment. 

“What?”

“My mom always loved the Shoshone,” he says, forcing his voice into a flat calm but not quite succeeding. There’s not much that Abby knows about Vera Kane, except that she is ten years dead, and that when she died, Marcus resigned his commission in Army and now — that he likely joined the National Forest Service because it would have made her happy, in life. “When I was a kid, when she’d be driving me to my dad’s for the summer, we’d always stop here. I hated going to my dad’s, but I loved being out here. She loved being out here. When she was dying, she’d always ask but… I was… the Pentagon would have given me leave, had I asked. Maybe she could have seen it again.” 

Not entirely sure what to make of that, Abby keeps hiking, her tower blending out from the trees as a grey fleck half a mile off. 

“So you think this is your penance?” she asks. 

“No,” he answers, maybe too quickly. “Maybe. I don’t know.” He clears his throat, a dull noise at the back of his mouth that pitches a wordless sound between his lips and his teeth, indecisive. Finally, he says, “I can’t leave it.” 

“We don’t have to talk about it.” 

Then, for a few minutes, they don’t talk about anything at all. 

As she’s clearing some brush along the trail, she hears the rustling of papers, and then, “I just got the call with the weather forecast. There’s a storm system coming through tomorrow night.”

“Will it be enough to put out the fire?”

“Not likely. It’s gonna be a lot of wind, a lot of lightning, and golf-ball sized hail,” he says, audibly frowning. “Might knock out the communication lines, but we’ll have our radios. Tomorrow I’ll need you to go out and look for potential damage — any dead trees, dry brush. Give the firefighters an idea of what they might have to work with.” 

“Can do,” she replies, inwardly dreading the prospect. But this is what she signed up to do, what she’s getting paid for — even if it isn’t her six figure salary back at County. “So you won’t be doing any of the legwork, then?” 

“Seniority,” he says, the smile returning to his voice. 

Abby scoffs. “Smug.” 

The radio crackles softly, as if he’s going to respond, but ultimately goes dead. The only sound as she continues hiking back towards her tower is the crunch of dried brush under her boots and the faint, echoing burbling of the nearby creek. The quiet is pervading — she hasn’t learned how to live with it yet. The ER is a cacophony of voices and machines, the press of bodies in C-Booth or the metallic  _ clank  _ and whirring  _ hiss  _ of life support machines. But home, in the big house she once shared with Jake and Clarke before the divorce… the silence was pervading there too, an insidious creeping silence that showed up one morning when Clarke began to refuse to come down for dinner, began leaving early in the mornings. Here, at least, she doesn’t yet have to face that she may have divorced her husband, and also lost her child. 

Her boots clunk up the wooden steps to her tower. Her first days in Shoshone she took them tenderly, wary of the weathered planks giving out from under her to send her tumbling to the tall dry grass below. Now her thighs barely even burn as she climbs the rise to her perch thirty feet above the ground.

She pushes through the door, and flips on the light. A second later the generator begins to hum in its shed, and the lookout is filled with a yellow glow. 

“Are you back to your tower?”

“Are you tracking me, Kane?” she asks, her lips twisting into a smirk. 

“I saw the light go on.”

For a moment, she considers toying with him — life out here, as impermanent as theirs are, is tedious. But Marcus spent twelve years in the special forces before consigning himself to a life of quiet boredom. For the next two months, he’s her only tether to any kind of humanity besides her own. As easily as she could feign confusion and put him on alert, she wouldn’t hazard his displeasure with her. 

She doesn’t know what he’s seen in war; her mind provides abstract images of deserts and mountains and disquieted days followed by bloodless bodies, if there were bodies to bring home at all. As easily as her own hands crack open ribs to bare a patient’s heart, she cannot be so violent with Marcus Kane’s. 

He might stop talking to her. 

“Yeah, that’s me,” she says. 

“Any plans for tonight?” 

“Reading, drinking, staring blankly out into the darkness. The usual grind.” She kicks her boots off across the room, and then drops heavily onto her bed, the springs creaking in protest. Despite her acute aware of the sweat dribbling down her back, she flings herself down to stare up at the ceiling, the slow rotation of the fan. “I’ve got half a bottle of Jameson that I took from those teenagers setting off fireworks at the lake.” 

He laughs. “Sounds like a good night.”

“What about you? Another date with your crosswords?” 

“My Glenfiddich is looking mighty friendly. Though I might need it to sleep tomorrow night, with the storm.” 

“Oh, yeah.” She lifts her head a fraction, squints across room to the bottle on her desk. “I might want to save that Jameson, then.” 

“Guess that’s a date for us, then.” 

His voice lowers half an octave, a suggestion. She could write it off as an artifact of the radio’s poor audio, or… she could not. 

“Are you planning on getting me drunk, Marcus?” she teases back. When was the last time she flirted? She feels ridiculous, out of practice. Her life is about precision and accuracy. Or it _was._ But there’s no thought out here, far removed from her hermetic trauma rooms and twelve-step protocols. “What kind of girl do you think I am?” 

She cringes at herself. 

“Listen, when this summer is over… I’ll buy you a drink,” he drawls, voice plummeting to a rasp and sending a shock of heat between her thighs. “Then you can ask me if I’m planning on getting you drunk. I know a bar down in Cody.” 

Mouth gaping open, she fumbles for a reply, squeezing her legs together. “That, I might hold you to.” 

She’s abandoned so much of her old life already from the day that she sat at the kitchen table at the end of a seventy-two hour shift, reeking of sweat and vomit and piss, to tell Jake it was over, has left so much of herself behind some invisible divide of before and after, was willing to drive herself out from Los Angeles to Cody, Wyoming to take a job out in the middle of god-fucking-forsaken  _ nowhere _ . But try as she might, she cannot quite live in abandon yet. 

But when Marcus talks, hot and thick and syrupy as the summer.

When Marcus talks.

 

 

 

 

**Day 82.**

“Abby, wake up.” Marcus’ voice, pointed and to the point, echoes from her radio’s charging dock across the room. “Abby get out of bed and answer your radio.”

Slumber does not give her up easily, and it takes Abby a few attempts for her eyes to open and remain open. Unable to keep her head steadily above her feet, she stumbles past the firefinder and grabs the walkie off the desk, and brings it to her mouth. 

“What do you want, Marcus?” she yawns, half-slurring. 

But it’s not his voice that answers.  

“Hey — hey Mom?” 

“Clarke?” Her voice breaks over the vowel, a mix of exhaustion and emotion and a sudden burst of adrenaline through her leaden limbs. 

“Oh, you sound tired.”

“No baby,” she assures her, or tries to, falling into the chair at her desk. “No — it’s just, it’s late here. Almost four in the morning.” 

“I think I did my math wrong, with the time differences. I’m sorry, Mom.”

“Don’t apologize, honey.” 

Her heart skitters in her chest, leaping and missing a beat at the same time — she’s heard nothing but silence from Clarke for  _ so long.  _

“Are you having a nice time?”

“Yeah, it’s good here. Beautiful, nothing like home.”

“That’s great, Mom,” Clarke replies, tone devoid of the resentment Abby’s become accustomed to hearing from her daughter. “Really great.” 

“I’ve missed you, sweetie. Really missed you.” 

Like a phantom limb, she’s thought in the daytime. Amputees arriving in her emergency room, screaming as their brains fight to rewire their nerves to fix what can never be fixed, re-establish signal with the leg or the arm severed months, years, decades ago. The mind’s ever-present urge to heal, to complete. An ache that can surge into a violent fire as synapses send impulses from nowhere to nowhere, refusing to believe that the limb is gone. 

Abby aches to hold her child. 

“I’ve missed you too, Mom.” Clarke says, then pauses. “Well, I’ll let you get back to sleep then.” 

“Okay, Clarke.” Her voice slurs again, her body pitching forward. She’s weighed down by the length of her days, the miles she walks — but she must re-establish the signal. Clumsily, she fiddles with the antenna on the radio. 

“Kane, that Ranger guy. He seems nice.” 

Even as her eyes close, she pushes back the tide of sleep. “Mmhm. Sure.” 

“Bye Mommy.” 

 

 

 

 

When she awakens, still slumped over at the desk, back twinging with a dull pain, she notices the clouds on the horizon. Low and dark, they churn against blue sky upwards over the mountains. But the air is thick, the trees unmoving, and Abby knows from the weather reports that they have some time before any rain begins. 

She already knows her task for the day — scout any fire hazards, and eliminate as many as possible — and therefore doesn’t radio Marcus. Just dresses herself in her cleanest pair of denim shorts, a faded black tank, and ties a flannel around her waist before jamming her feet into her hiking boots and lacing them tightly. Walkie talkie at her hip and pack strapped to her back, she stomps gracelessly down to the bottom of her tower, refills her canteen from the cistern, and heads west. 

Drafting a letter to Clarke in her mind, she tests out words and phrases to the trees and the birds and the empty trails. 

But nearly a year since the day, and she still has no good explanation for why she divorced her father. It didn’t even stop working. Neither of them committed adultery or an act of violence or aggression. But it hung there, their marriage, static and unchanging. A fixed point in her life, which in her forties now seemed… terrifying, among the shuffle and chaos of Clarke’s coming of age and her promotion to ER Director. 

“My mom loved a good storm.” 

Marcus doesn’t speak about Vera unprompted, so Abby waits for the explanation. 

“I’m looking at the storm through my scope. The wind is beginning to pick up in Sector 2,” he continues. He’ll stop, if she doesn’t respond and he’s not in the mood to harass her. 

“Your mom loved everything about nature, didn’t she? Even the destructive things?” 

“She said they reminded us how blessed we are to be alive.” 

“Do you?” Abby asks.

“Do I what?”

“Feel blessed to be alive?” She asks him for no reasons besides that she has no answer to the question herself. Not a yes, not a no. 

He thinks for a moment. “I think I’m  _ lucky  _ to be alive. I know I have a purpose, being alive, even if I don’t always think I’m the best man for the job. I know that when my mom died, when my sister died — and it was a miracle that I was — that I was still alive. I come through three tours and they’re taken out by a drunk driver and a house fire. The things I’ve seen — I don’t even think there’s meaning to it.” 

She stops, looking out over the sloping trail leading down to the canyon. “You don’t think life has any meaning?” 

“No.” He laughs humorlessly. “I think the only thing with any meaning is what we do. The rest of it, the shit that happens to us — means fuckall.” 

“But you’re here, and your niece and nephew are—” There’s no way to end that delicately, to avoid insinuating that Marcus was doing anything but avoiding filial responsibility by asking the courts to keep Octavia and Bellamy with their emergency placement with the family — the Greens, Abby thinks, the name of the family was  _ Green _ — after the fire that killed Aurora. 

“With their foster family, until college term starts.” 

“Wouldn’t you rather be with them?” 

“It’s the best place for them,” he answers shortly. With a sigh, Abby begins to hike again, but then the line opens again. “About last night…” 

“What?” 

Huffing, she expects him to retract his offer to take her out at the end of the summer. 

“You were muttering. In your sleep,” Marcus says, sounding equally uncomfortable and smug. “The radio must have activated, somehow, but you were talking in your sleep, to Clarke.” 

_ “What?” _

Fuck. 

“Abby, I’m just saying. I’m not the only one who isn’t where they should be right now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos are always very much appreciated!


End file.
